Oslo Interactive English - Final Report
Introduction
Oslo Interactive English (OIE) is a flexible learning environment, offering supplementary
exercise material on the Web to undergraduate students of English at the University of Oslo.
Aims
OIE has two main aims:
• to improve students' language skills
• to introduce the corpus method to the students
The structure of OIE
The exercises
The exercises focus on English grammar in use and have been divided into seven main topics:
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Adjectives & adverbs
Nouns & verbs
Function words
Vocabulary
Text
English vs. Norwegian
Miscellaneous
Each of these topics includes exercises on various subtopics. Each subtopic contains eight
exercises that all follow one of four different exercise types: multiple choice, gapping, error
correction, and "open".
The use of the corpus method is most prominent in the multiple choice and open
exercises, where the corpus has to be consulted in order to answer the exercises. In the
multiple choice exercises, the students are given specific corpus search tasks to perform. This
exercise type is therefore first and foremost an introduction to the corpus method.
The open exercises also require that the students use the corpus. However, more
corpus skills are needed, since guidance as to which searches to perform is not given to the
same extent. Furthermore, the open exercises are more theoretical in nature, i.e. in addition to
corpus skills, the students need some knowledge of English grammar to solve the tasks
presented.
In the gapping and error correction exercises, it is up to the students whether and how
they want to use the corpus.
The exercises of each subtopic are set up in the following order:
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#1 and #2 -- multiple choice
#3 and #4 -- gapping
#5 and #6 -- error correction
#7 and #8 -- open
This ordering ensures learning progress both as regards language skills and corpus skills.
Before the students are comfortable with the corpus method it is recommended that the
exercises are answered in that order. However, once the students' corpus skills have improved,
the exercises can be answered in any order.
Suggested answers
When the students submit their answers to one of the exercises, their score will pop up in a
small window. From there they can click their way to the suggested answers.
For students who score less than 100% there are links pointing to online grammars
concerning the topic in question. There is also a link that will take the students to the corpus
search hints page.
The corpus
The OIE corpus is password protected and is only available to students at the University of
Oslo. Username and password can be obtained from the lecturers or from an online automatic
reply service.
The corpus consists of approx. 7 million running words of 20th century fictional and
non- fictional English. The texts include books, reports, speeches, and film scripts.
The main bulk of the corpus is taken from the Longman/Lancaster English Language
Corpus which was purchased by IBA in the early 1990s. However, the original corpus is
hardly recognisable since the OIEC is about half the size of the Longman/Lancaster English
Language Corpus. In addition, texts have been added and quite a lot of editing has been done,
e.g. errors caused by the scanning process have been corrected, "damaged" chunks of text
(caused by the scanning process) have been deleted, etc.
The students have the corpus at their disposal at all times, either directly from the
exercise page or from the corpus search window.
The development of OIE
OIE has been developed over the past year (2004-2005) mainly by one person working half
time.
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It has required various skills, including programming skill in php, JavaScript, and Perl,
web publishing (html, xml) and design skills, corpus skills, knowledge of various aspects of
the English language that are part of the curriculum for undergraduate students of English.
Remaining tasks
Although OIE is fully functional, there is still room for improvement.
Should future funding become available, the following points ought to be given
priority:
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Development of more exercises;
Improve "Specific search hints";
Show more context in corpus searches;
Trivial Corpus Pursuit;
Funny illustrations;
Integaration of the OSEN Translation course;
Concluding remarks
Working on OIE has been rewarding in many ways. It has given insight into the various
aspects of making a web-based and data-driven course; what the main challenges of such an
undertaking are; what skills are required to undertake such a task.
Some effort went into the planning stage of how to create a package that would be
attractive to students. How to present exercises that are more "fun" to solve than more
traditional language exercises.
The aim was to develop non-obligatory exercises that combined the practical aspect of
answering exercises and discovery- learning (by using a corpus). One challenge relating to this
was to integrate the corpus / data-driven method into exercise types that are not traditionally
connected with corpus work.
Although OIE can be accessed and explored by students in their own time, experience
(from researchers in the field) has shown that students tend to need some face-to- face (nonvirtual) guidance when it comes to corpus use. It is therefore suggested that an introduction to
OIE is given in one of the on-campus courses at the start of every term. OIE is also suitable
for group work where a teacher is present. Courses in continuing education can also benefit
from the exercise material found in OIE.
OIE has not yet been evaluated, neither by teachers no r students. This should be done
as soon as possible, since the success of OIE very much hinges on the result of such an
evaluation.
SOE, February 2005
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